Surround sound is often mistaken as a relatively new phenomenon in cinemas, one that emerged in the 1970s with the arrival of Dolby. Making Stereo Fit reveals that, in fact, filmmakers have been creating stereo and surround-sound effects for nearly a century, since the advent of talking pictures, and argues that their endurance owes primarily to the longstanding battles between stereo and mono technologies. Throughout the book, Eric Dienstfrey analyzes newly discovered archival materials and myriad stereo releases, from Hell’s Angels (1930) to Get Out (2017), to show how Hollywood’s financial dependence on mono prevented filmmakers from seeing surround sound’s full aesthetic potential. Though studios initially explored stereo’s unique capabilities, Dienstfrey details how filmmakers eventually codified a conservative set of surround-sound techniques that prevail today, despite the arrival of more immersive formats.

About the Author

Eric Dienstfrey is Visiting Assistant Professor of Media and Communication Studies at Ursinus College.

Contents

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments

Introduction: Stereo Front and Center

1. Widescreens, Headphones, and Concert Halls: Film Stereo’s Identity Crisis
2. Fantasia and Failure on a Theme by Bell Telephone
3. The Cinerama Experience 83
4. The Triple-Track Disruption and the CinemaScope Solution
5. Perspecta, Todd-AO, and the Emergence of Monocentrism
6. Dolby Stereo: The End of an Era
Conclusion: Life’s the Same, Movies in Stereo

Notes
Bibliography
Illustration Credits
Index

Reviews

"Making Stereo Fit provides important clarifications to the scholarly understanding of stereo technology, and – with the key idea of monocentrism – introduces a crucial concept to the study of film style."
— Music Sound and the Moving Image

"Illustrating how technical and aesthetic changes need to resonate with their surrounding industrial context before they can become part of the apparatus, the book’s model should prove generative to media historians."
— Film Quarterly

"Making Stereo Fit reveals the fascinating long history of surround sound in American cinema. Making a major contribution to histories of film sound, Eric Dienstfrey’s elegant synthesis of his meticulous research establishes how the dynamic tension of innovation and fit to norms has been central to film sound design from the early sound period to the present."—Helen Hanson, author of Hollywood Soundscapes: Film Sound Style, Craft and Production in the Classical Era

"Combining archival research with descriptive acoustic analysis—all while embedded in a context of U.S. film technologies in economic flux—Dienstfrey provides a compelling guide to the historic innovations and creative reinventions that have come to define the art, aesthetics, and science of cinema sound."—Miranda Banks, author of The Writers: A History of American Screenwriters and Their Guild

"A deeply researched history of technological decision-making that offers rich and provocative reconsiderations of important films, this outstanding book will shape many future conversations about the development of stereophonic expression and cinematic sound. More than any book in recent memory, Making Stereo Fit explains how movies came to sound the way they do."—Neil Verma, author of Theater of the Mind: Imagination, Aesthetics, and American Radio Drama

"Making Stereo Fit illuminates the possibilities and challenges that three-dimensional sound presented to inventors, filmmakers, studios, exhibitors, and audiences. Dienstfrey’s absorbing history makes audible the industrial, economic, and aesthetic forces that shaped—and limited—stereo’s dynamic role in film history."—Nathan Platte, author of Making Music in Selznick’s Hollywood

About the Book

About the Author

Table of Contents

Reviews